The difficulty varies though.   This is a history question to some extent, someone who knows their stuff could quote some facts on this.    But even present tense various companies around the world will quote you different costs to their mining

There is hard rock mining, the proper underground stuff.  Expensive but can bring entire seams of gold or the much cheaper alluvial mining which is surface mining for fragments of gold distibuted usually by water, rivers and glaciers over many years.    That can be cheap, depends if the gold has collected together or not.
   Mining grades for open pit vary from 1 gram of gold per ton to maybe over 10 grams or more per ton which would be great (much riches ).

This hypothetical gold mine I presume would be high grade and concentrated, if it really was a large amount of gold; then yes it is probably going to alter the gold price.    In turn this might cause economic change but modern day we dont really trade off gold, we base it off dollars which are incredibly more plentiful then any mine has ever been.

One of the largest gold mines in the world is on the 7 peaks route.  Its on the way to one of the highest mountain peaks in the world and on top of the world is this great big gold mine.   They have taken off the entire top to one of these peaks (not the summit), they liquate it and built a great big water slide to send it down to port for proper refining.    Plus on top of that they had terrorists attack them for a ransom I think it was.
Anyhow my point is costs can be massive or it could be very simple to get the gold like the original California gold rush - they just picked lumps of gold off the ground   (a bit like btc except without the price rise perhaps)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Summits

Bitcoin address: 12NSiJ3HJaMvYBj83wycPCZQVuWYicNKZF
Starting posts: 675


Its Sunday going on Monday so I presume Im ok to join and qualify ok ?

That last rumour was for Gaddafi I think.    Iraq had no trade for oil for gold or anything at all except where allowed by UN in exchange for goods, they were not able to make demands at that time.   Makes the war kinda pointless since they were largely disarmed.

There were allegations of corruption, bribes for the oil but I dont think this was enough reason to invade

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_for_food

The new website opens up like the credits on a James Bond movie.   That is seriously smooth and I was going to moan about the prices not being there but I wont

The BC graph looks constructive at last glance

Not sure why the wallet is using up so much processor time now.   Didnt used to do this.   Will it use more cpu when updating, substantially I mean.  
I had to throttle its usage.   I presume its not trying to mine :p   Staking is not especially intensive right

1

If USA recorded 30% inflation in one month, that would be the end of it.   To have that condition existing longer term wont happen unless nobody was really using it.  It would require a reversal of the current state where the whole globe uses it as a proxy

 0.001 BTC <= 0.1 BTC                910893
Its saying maybe 900 thousand accounts exist with 0.1 btc in them and so on.

It doesnt really work as so many people dont hold an account on the blockchain.  There are with places like gox for a proxy so we'll never know that easily.

Over a thousand people with 1000 btc, I dont believe that.   That'd be alot of millionaires, I think that is actually businesses and collections of people.    I think forum accounts is more accurate even with dead or fake ones
300k bitcoin users worldwide on a regular basis would be impressive enough

How much tax does Paypal pay on its business.    They wouldnt be very happy if some collective just replaces that business without giving its tip.    It has taken business I guess, much less then 10% I think.    Paypal lets people send or even request money from an email address where as bitcoin generally does not so they are not comparable in markets they are addressing right now.
If BTC replace PP globally I'd say 100k per coin maybe but I reckon they'd miss the tax revenue and come looking for it

If the chinese find this gold mine it wont affect the price because the Chinese no longer export any gold.   They are the worlds largest gold miners, Im not saying this will always be the case but it is today.  Over time, I think the majority of gold has come from South Africa as it has special meteor displacement of its crust; not true most places.

But right now if China finds gold they will keep it hence the price would not change.  The reason we can say this is China is greatly lacking in gold reserves, a communist nation for fifty years this is no great surprise.
I believe they even lag behind UK (proportionally) which famously sold the majority of its gold at the lowest prices possible.   Obviously China lags USA with its fort knox reserves.    It has a great many people and so this is why they are so poor in this respect (but not in production)

It wont happen but in theory USA has that 17tn debt and yes the gold is in theory spent many times over and USA is not a rich nation at all, but in theory they can default the paper debt and be the richest via their gold reserves.   They have after all made it quite clear dollars do not give any claim to their gold.




Despite this, the above reference to paper gold and its distorting effects; this applies to dollars more then anything.  More then an ETF or futures contract, its really about the world over valuing the dollar because it used to be based on gold and it has gone so far from that standard that we are effectively walking on air here like a wile e coyote cartoon.  SO long as we believe, dont look down and apply cartoon physics then the world economy will continue on this way I suppose but if its ever tested we should find much weakness in many currencies that are stacked against this 40 year old Nixon standard



History has a couple examples of this so if you want the future check the past.  Off hand there is there is the Spanish empire mining south american.   They obtained alot of gold also silver.  Long term silver price has been debased far more then gold as an offset of the industrial revolution.

Another example I heard was of an African King on pilgrimiage to Mecca.   He took gold for his travel expenses, so much that nations he passed through saw inflation.   This was recorded in Egyptian history I think

Dont people just put their big rigs in the garage and then its got airflow and kinda away from the house, problem solved.


I recognise that location, I think its below London in an old air-raid shelter.   The long tube structure is because its parallel to the underground train system ?


I like your website

Now that is not the case.  Without the mining arms race, we'd just run the network on our cpu.    Theres no great reason to have all this development except having one up on the next guy for a while until he gets something better and so on.
If we all just agreed to stick to cpu, the coin itself would have been just the same and we could expended the effort on something else.   However capitalism is not this way, always someone wants to make just a little more money then the next guy and so he'll invest to get that reward and so on.

My question has always been did the difficulty raises achieve any benefit for society or the users of the coins even.   The block time is fixed, all this tech didnt drop the transaction times.    So, I do wonder I guess its all in the name of security

In a capitalist competitive system there is a point, its to destroy efficency.   If one guy loses money on his old tech, generally society does gain from the new tech but here there seems no point to the asic.  I apologise if I miss the point but I think we should have one if it is correct that its lacking.   Lower the transaction times and vary the reward instead to stop excessive inflation - perhaps or maybe this makes problems with orphans or forks.   I dont know but hopefully good people are considering these things

That is one heck of an impressive beard.   I dont even know myself just sounds like opportunity when people have no idea how to even address with what noun that sector of a market.  The mining operation pic is my favourite there, but that poor lady going bare foot now thats hard work !

The problem with too many coins is you saturate the demand.  So the price can fall below 1 satoshi which means the coin has effectively delisted itself.

Maybe it survives anyway and swaps to ltc but really you are shooting yourself in the foot.   Why keep anything that will have twice as much available in a month.

A fork is fine if improves previous mistakes

Would blackhalo relate to this announcement of pay to script addressing   http://blog.coinkite.com/post/87302244461/now-with-p2sh-support?

in that example the price would probably go down some or value even.   Some of the buyers are not able to keep up with inflation, you have demand destruction from inflation so the price is 1.4 million or slightly less then 2 tons of silver.

It could be argued somebody will have their income completely outside the inflation, possibly yes but if some of the buyers are effected then in an auction type scenario likely the price does fall a bit as the highest bidder no longer has to compete with as many available buyers.  Since a museum quite often a buyer at auction this seems valid as it does then relate to the general public.

  Even the richest of the rich are connected through their business to the normal business of a country.   If inflation is making prices unstable and less trade is done reliably, contract pricing accuracy fails and balance sheets must account for greater volatility in their costs.
  It then becomes opposite to JIT or just in time, where stock must be built up to buffer against this instability.  All in this will affect even the richest prices most likely, underneath inflation an economy can grow smaller with lower real values in wages and all sorts

Can people tell me how many megabytes their energycoin directories are ?   Seems to run into hundreds of meg for me

Side of a building would be more like it.   If you are going to do a plane, it'd better be a 747 so people can really notice it.   Go big or go home, some little cessna I cant even make out as its miles away as usually planes often are, no point.

The doge car was neat but did they do a race or the whole season because a team typically sponsored by a brand really needs to build up the ilk and the colours to be recognisable for themselves even without the logo visible just the feel of it all becomes soaked in.  The brand merges into the team, into the race.
   Thats how advertising works really, subconsciously you acknowledge and take it in the context of its environment.  Takes more then just a blip of a radar, has to be more of a consistent rising trend and then the consumer becomes more familiar and hey like coke and xmas its just part of the scenery and it seems wrong not to have it there

I hope they are paying you back then.  I read recently some Leh bonds sold for 100, bought at 20 cents on the dollar after bankruptcy have no returned more then the original 100.   Ie. there was nothing wrong with the debt, it was viable.   This mostly applies to the european side of the business apparently, that was dragged under.   Even the USA based bonds should return money in many cases apparently, it just might take ten or twenty years

Sub prime Im not sure what the deal is, did it really all goto zero.  Except I read about demo groups like the wallstreet protesters buying housing debt and then releasing the home owners from the debt, or distributing the assets to the community.  Obviously that is charity as the bond has returned zero in that case

The wealthy have the money to move anywhere in the world they want.   If Im a millionaire, I will jump on my yacht and goto hong kong perhaps.
There I wont be as rich but who wants to stay and do the hard work.

Trying to favour one person over the other doesnt work.    If the lenders decided this greek debt was a good idea then they must pay for their judgement, if they want any return it is on their backs to help the business they lent to, now they are the owners of it not the people.  

Who is paying stupidly high taxes in Greece now, the rich can just off shore their wealth.  The common man cannot take his donkey and goto hong kong, he has to stay behind, the bail outs almost certainly favour the richest people because the poor never had much to lose in the first place but the taxes and inflation does hurt them.
  Also the greece situation is stopping new jobs, its massively ironic but its not impossible to understand that after bankruptcy you have cleared space for new business not owned by the rich or politically connected but people with good ideas and hard work.   Take away the failure and you lose the possibility of replacing the bad business with good.

When the OP talks about deflation or contraction, these arguments almost always ignore political interference.   Who passes laws to stop trade, to force taxes, regulations, to make rules why you cannot do your simple work and sell it.  Is that capitalism failing or politics saturating every transaction.   There is zero reason why fair exchange of a fixed currency be it gold or bitcoin is any negative to those people

Intrinsic would be a snipe on the fact bitcoin has no base exchangeable worth, so they are saying it will goto zero and/or be replaced.    Dollars are made from cotton, ditto just a comment on its priced value being far beyond its base worth.  Gold is an element, it will never be replaced so that would have intrinsic value at some level though some say its also overvalued, etc
Extrinsic, oppisite means not essential ie bitcoin cannot be argued to be essential

Thats circular logic imo.  Anything at all can make money.  I'll buy a jar of air from you for more then you bought it if I felt like.     A man made millions from selling pet rocks.  Can the owners said to have made an investment, the rocks did appreciate at least initially

I think investment is a (re)usable entity that returns a positive from the utility it provides.  Bitcoin maybe could be argued as unique and useful, its enabling business to take place globally that might otherwise be difficult.  However I would say its more of a commodity and the investment potential lies with the companies that utilise it not the bitcoin by itself.  
 Gold or silver are not investments, they have no return from themselves however they can be crafted to a product or they can allow stable business to be conducted similarly so that is utility but the investment return is in their use not the raw metal same with bitcoin. I dont think bitcoin gives a return only speculative gains from others activity, its an inverse relationship not direct investment similar to plain dollars